Ok so I found a solution to the photo gallery but it isn't exactly what I had hoped. I signed up for a Flickr account and I will be using that to host images. This is because Windows Live Photo Gallery has a Publish To feature directly to Flickr. The fact that I have been using and recommending Live Photo Gallery to just about everyone I know for other reasons, such as the ability to make panoramic's and the way that it organizes and index's photos and the pictures folders in Vista and XP. 

The next thing that lead me to use Flickr was the Slide Show be Vertigo. This has a lot of features and a lot of ways that it can be used to present the images. It does not have a lot of choices for where it gets the data for the galleries. It uses a single file that holds the information, data.xml,  the file contains the information for the pictures such as the location, thumbnail location, and description

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

   2: <data startalbumindex="5" transition="CrossFadeTransition">

   3:     <album

   4:         title="Animals"

   5:         description="Photos of several animals (cross fade transition)"

   6:         image="../../Images/a29.jpg">

   7:         <slide

   8:             title="Monterey Aquarium Exhibit — Jellies: Living Art"

   9:             description="Photo taken by Alan Le"

  10:             image="../../Images/s07.jpg"

  11:             thumbnail="../../Images/t07.jpg" />

  12: ....

  13: <slide

  14:     title="1/1000"

  15:     description="Photo taken by Scott Stanfield"

  16:     image="../../Images/s19.jpg"

  17:     thumbnail="../../Images/t19.jpg" />

  18: bum>

  19: </data>

Now, if I wasn't lazy I would just accept that every time I upload an image I would have to edit the data.xml file manually to add the items. But I am lazy and I do not want to have to edit it every time I upload a photo. By using Flickr it allows for people to "stumble" accross some of my images, and it would do an automatic update to the slide show pages, also add new galleries as well. The only down side I have found so far is that I cannot organize it manually. I am still looking in the control sets for how to organize it alphabetically. Overall though that isn't a real down side because it will show the newer galleries first. It also does not show newest modified galleries first, so if I add an image it does not put that "set" at the top, but keeps it in order of newest "set" first. 

I am going to go ahead and wait about a week and see if I get any complaints about it. It does require Silverlight.

Here is my gallery

Here is my Flickr

Ok so I was able to fix my blog. Yeah me!! I am still not sure what had happened, but it would not allow me to fully login, it would only give me a page for Extentions, and Password changing.

How I fixed it was, uploaded my development code to the live server, it still didn't work correctly. Saved the live databases to my development server and verified everything worked there and it did. renamed the databases on the live server and then uploaded them back to the production server and poof everything worked. I have no idea how or why this worked, and I only have to restore two databases that I had made changes to before. But yeah that was it, just took two days to figure out what to do.

The database changes were I changed a couple of permission on how the production databases were set before it went live to allow me to do some other things.

So I am trying to do a screen cap for to show why I use Microsoft Virtual and I think I am just going to post it here.

This is the older Microsoft Virtual Server not Hyper-V. This is also running on a machine without AMD-V or Intel VT inside. It is not even a dual core machine, so things are a little slow, but they do work. One thing to keep in mind though is the amount of RAM that you give the machines, how much ram you give each one matters here.

Ok so for the video, I will be setting up a new virtual machine and walking through how to make that a "Master" image for them as well.

There are other ways to do this, and more then likely simpler ways to do this, but this is what I found and it does work for me, and this being my site, that is all that matters.

Sorry about the chirpy video, I need to figure out this video recording stuff a bit better.

Microsoft hopes so. In recent announcements and site redesigns, Microsoft has been updating their web site to use Silverlight to enhance their web site and user experiences. This isn't about numbers or

Ok so I do want to redo my photo gallery, and I would like to make it flashier and prettier and smoother. After doing the quick and ugly thing that I just did to get it to display, I think I might have found what I would want to do. I think I want to make the photo gallery in SilverLight, or find one that I can hack up to suit my wants. I think that might be the easier option. There are only a couple of questions that I do not have an answer to yet.

1. what will people on linux/mac do?
2. should I code two different picture pages for each?
3. Does it work with Visual Studio Web Express?
4. Do I have to install Web Expression?

I have just started looking at this, it turns out I am having some issues with my development site on Windows Server 2008. I need to resolve those first. But for the moment I think I will just use Visual Studios 2008 to do it instead of VS Web Express.

Ok I did some minor house keeping with the site. I moved the Blog to /blog and I will be making the changes from there. The reasoning behind this is after doing some tweaks, adjustments and playing around, I was not able to get the photos into a nicely displayable format on the web page. So I will just use both systems and make my site use the database for storage.

I also added ustream.tv as a live video of me. This will not always be on and I will not always be broadcasting. But if I am broadcasting, feel free to ask a question and I will try to answer it.

I do most of my slacking work from my laptop, so I tend to not to much. I recently found out how under powered this laptop actually is. I think it might be time to start saving my pennies for a new one, maybe something with a Core Duo just for the amount of stuff I have been doing. The new video section, and console for it, are flash, that is more resource intensive then I had though. Then there is the simple fact that I want to have Aero with it. I am a slave to eye candy is part of it, the other part is that I want the GUI features that aero has as well. So I have been making a list of the features that the laptop should have.

• Bluetooth - I actually use this
• Wireless   - This is standard on laptops now but at least G
• Camera    - This is still optional but would be nice to have
• Aero Support - This is a MUST
• higher resolution - would like a 15.4 with 1440x900

I like Toshiba's laptops a lot, and for the record all major manufactures have the same features, I just developed a loyalty for the Toshiba brand early, the first laptop I ever used was by Toshiba, it was a 486DX 66 with a build in modem and ran Windows 3.11/DOS 6.22

Ok I think I have ranted long enough.

No video post this time, trying the live thing more and want to get comfortable with that as well.

Well I tried a couple of "quick" hacks to Blog Engine.NET to get it to pull my photos from my old site to this one. It looks like I might have to change the setup for the blog engine, put it in its own sub directory, and put the old one in another sub directory, then cross link them. This is not the method I wanted to go, but own well.

I guess I will keep working at it though. I mean I was able to find the information from the old site, but I need to convert it to C# to work with this project, or create a new way to pull the data from the database. I think I might go with writing parts of it from scratch and using the databases. This does kind of kill the idea of making the code portable, at least for me. Let me state that I am not some uber coder or programmer. At best I am a good system administrator. That is why this is  a hobby and a personal site.

Also if anyone knows a asp.net 2.0 photo gallery software that can work with blog engine, let me know.

If I do get a photo gallery or picture plug-in to work, I will post it here.

Another item of interest, I have been recording my weekly team meetings on my web cam. I have run into my first issue, this last week's meeting was about an hour long, the video file size came out to be around 360MB. This doesn't sound like much, and on a local network it isn't, but I need to have the files sent to another country and they are on a slower speed.
I have tried to convert the file to other video formats in hopes of lowering the file size with no luck, on a couple it actually grew in size.
The other option, that I am working on, is to break the on file into smaller parts. I have no experience with video editing so this is a new realm for me. I am however trying to do this with Windows Movie Maker, and it doesn't run on my laptop. But if anyone knows a better way, give me a shout.